Investment Mistakes: Wealth Lost to Youth and Ignorance

Invest. It’s the best thing you can do for your future. Well, that and get an education, marry someone rich who also owns a Ferrari dealership, and if you want to be a writer, choose to do something else more respectable like flip burgers, deliver newspapers, or sell vacuums door to door.

I think we all have stories about things we should have invested in when we didn’t, and money we spend when we should not have. I bought 69 Mercury Cougar for next to nothing, put new brakes on it all the way around, and sold it to buy a motorcycle. Now they sell for gawd-awful amounts of money at car auctions. The motorcycle? Long gone.

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But if you have made such errors, don’t worry. You are not alone. Shaquille O’Neal recalled in a recent interview with Graham Bensinger why he refused to work with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz: “I’m like “coffee, eh,” because growing up, in my household, I’d never seen a black person drink coffee. So it was my thought process that black people didn’t drink coffee.”

Magic Johnson, however, bought several franchises, which he sold back to the company in 2010.

Once a friend tried to get me to invest in gold. But it was much too expensive at $400 an ounce. “We’ll never get that out of it,” I told him. As of this writing, it is $1100 an ounce, and historically has been even higher. Brilliant.

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I’m a writer, not a money manager. Obviously. Otherwise I would have shipped my money overseas. “Money-laundering by wire transfer is one of the most common types of money laundering, owing to the relative ease and speed with which these transactions can be completed. makes tracking them after the fact exceedingly difficult,” says University of Texas El-Paso student Barry Peterson in his student research for titled Red Flags and Black Markets.

Certainly a thriller writer who can plot out an entire novel can think of a plausible method for shipping money overseas and saving for retirement? The only issue, of course, is thriller writers do not have any money.

So why not save some? Well, if I were good, I could. Although I am not a millennial per se, I did find these ten tips useful, although challenging. Like budgeting and paying your bills on time, it really teaches you how to be careful with your money especially has you get older and realize you need money to do everything.

Of course, if I had hung on to the 401K I had in my early 20’s, or the one I had in my 30’s, or the stock options I had of Micron and Albertsons when I was in college…

But you could be Yahoo, who missed out on buying Facebook in 2006, and is still struggling two CEO’s later, Of course, Real Networks and Phillips both passed on the iPod. (Apple did not invent it, just said yes after those companies said no).

But sometimes, investment that seems wise doesn’t work out. In 1999, Apple was in serious trouble. The company was running low on cash, its stock was trading for around $5 a share, and it was hunting for a new CEO.

Then Apple received $150 million from a seemingly unlikely source: Microsoft. The deal was negotiated by Apple adviser Steve Jobs. Shortly afterward, Jobs took over as Apple’s “interim” CEO, which seems to have worked out at least for Apple.

So when you feel like you blew that investment opportunity, sold, or worse threw away something potentially valuable, just know you are not alone. Even the best intended have done the same thing.

Speaking of investments, it might be a good idea to double check the amount your spending on your broadband. My friend recently did some price comparison on quotes for a similar service and he was amazed by how much he could save. Now he has more money to go into his 401k. If you’re interested in saving more, click here.

Start saving your money, ship it overseas for your eventual flight and subsequent retirement, and don’t look back. Investment mistakes will probably happen again.